


Black & Blue

by provocative_envy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Angst, Character Study, Developing Relationship, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Minor Character Death, Non-Graphic Violence, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Road Trips, Romance, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-03
Updated: 2017-08-03
Packaged: 2018-12-10 08:29:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11687883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/provocative_envy/pseuds/provocative_envy
Summary: She escapes L.A. in the trunk of a battered blue Crown Victoria.





	Black & Blue

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. this is probably the most self-indulgent thing i've ever written. 
> 
> 2\. it's basically shameless pansy parkinson id fic, cleverly disguised as a post-apocalyptic romance, and the majority of the world-building/zombie mythology is a patchy mishmash of things i took from various movies, tv shows, and video games. 
> 
> 3\. i hand-waved, like...so much of the survival stuff in this story. the most realistic plot point might actually be the zombies.
> 
> 4\. comments/kudos are greatly appreciated! enjoy!
> 
> xoxo

 

* * *

 

The I-10 is the United States' southernmost cross-country highway.

It stretches from the palm trees in Santa Monica, from the glittering waves of the Pacific Ocean and the dimly-lit booths of the overpriced sushi bars, through the cavernous deserts of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, around the swampy, constantly-shifting backwater of the Gulf Coast and all the way to...whatever the fuck is in Jacksonville, Florida.

Pansy doesn't know.

She's never been to Jacksonville, Florida.

 

* * *

 

She escapes L.A. in the trunk of a battered blue Crown Victoria.

It's an old cop car with gaping, mildew-framed stains where the riot gear and radio equipment used to be, and an ancient, static-fuzzy siren that's somehow still functional. The guy who's driving—who'd tersely agreed to smuggle her past the barbed-wire fences and the CDC checkpoints and the fucking _National Guard_ barricades, god—is wearing faded gray Army fatigues and an incredibly shiny watch.

He'd introduced himself as Salazar.

_East,_ she'd blurted out in response, _I need to go east._

Now, it's sticky and sweltering and she's curled up with her arms wrapped snugly around her legs, running the ragged ends of her fingernails through the thin layer of grime coating the bruises on her knees. Sweat is crystallizing on the nape of her neck, and her breath is coming in harsh and rattling and desperate. The delicate chain of her necklace is cool against her skin, and she finds herself focusing on it, trying not to count the bumps in the road, trying not to notice the sound of balding tires slithering across summer-hot asphalt—trying not to notice much of anything.

There's blood, tacky and stiff, smeared across her face.

A handprint.

 

* * *

 

When the car finally lurches to a stop, the sun is slung low across the sky and there's a chalky green brontosaurus staring down at her from its perch above a bunch of picnic benches.

"What," she croaks, swallowing around the dryness in her throat. She sits up. Her muscles are sore, and tense, and visibly shaky from the effort of holding herself still for so long. "Where are we?"

Salazar tosses her a bottle of Crystal Geyser. The seal hasn't been cracked. "You know the outlet mall? Out by Palm Springs?"

She takes a small sip of water. It's lukewarm. "No," she says, tugging at a loose thread hanging from the bottom of her cut-offs. "I'm not...from California."

"No shit." Salazar snorts, kind of wryly, before squinting into the distance. It's quiet. Eerie. There's an economy-sized white cargo van parked several feet away; the windows have all been smashed open, the tattered remnants of a grease-splotchy McDonald's bag fluttering around shards of broken glass. "What's your name?"

She gingerly climbs out of the trunk, wincing at the painful stretch in her lower back. "Pansy."

"Pansy," Salazar repeats, scratching at his chin. He has a goatee, dark hair and dark eyes and deeply tanned skin. He's wearing a wedding ring—thick, chunky platinum—but she knows that doesn't mean anything. "How old are you, Pansy?"

Her chest tightens. "Why?"

"You...remind me of someone," he says, too vaguely, and then clenches his jaw. "You said you needed to go east?"

She doesn't immediately answer.

Instead, she prods at a scab on her lower lip with the tip of her tongue and forces herself not to flinch at the taste, dark and dirty and metallic. Getting out of L.A. was smart. She has to remember that. Those—things, with their rotting flesh and their undead shrieks, with their jagged claws and their spongey skulls and their _teeth_ , craggy molars and rounded incisors, not human, no, but still human _enough_ to make it really, really hurt if they bit down, if they—

If.

If.

_If._

Her future is now a hypothetical.

She has to remember that, too.

 

* * *

 

An hour goes by.

Salazar offers her a chocolate Power Bar and another bottle of water while he rocks back on his heels, crosses and uncrosses his arms, flicks wary glances around the otherwise empty parking lot; he seems to be waiting for something, waiting for _someone_ , maybe, and his obvious impatience is putting Pansy on edge.

"I'm twenty-one," she finally says. "My birthday was in January."

"Right." Salazar's nostrils flare. "You should stop looking at me like that."

"What?"

He shakes out his wrist. "If I was going to hurt you, I'd have already done it."

She pauses. "I don't think that's how hurting people works."

"Oh?"

"Yeah," she says, idly straightening the tiny seed pearl cross on her necklace. "Like, it all counts the same, right? I don't think it's first come, first serve."

Salazar blinks for a second, his eyebrows twitching up towards his hairline, but then he barks out a laugh. "I like that. That's—I like that. Where did you..." he trails off, cocking his head to the side.

"Where did I what?" Pansy asks, picking at the gummy red slivers of her cuticles. The shadows on the ground are getting blurrier, less distinct, the shape of the enormous gray T-Rex looming across from the brontosaurus starting to wane with the remaining scraps of sunlight.

"Pansy."

She freezes at the tone of Salazar's voice; sharp and alarmed. "Yeah?"

"Pansy," he says again, carefully reaching for the pistol holstered under his ribs. "Do you hear that?"

 

* * *

 

_That_ is the far-off, too-loud growl of a diesel engine.

_That_ is a gleaming, cherry-red F-250 turning in off the access road, spraying gravel all over the forgotten white cargo van.

_That_ is—

"Jesus fucking Christ," Salazar mutters, lowering his pistol and scowling at the guy hopping down from the cab of the truck. "Seriously, Godric? _This_ is your idea of subtle?"

The guy— _Godric_ , apparently—just grins and kicks his door shut, a shotgun in one hand and an industrial-sized flashlight in the other. He's...big. Tall. Broad-shouldered, bulky with muscle, biceps straining at the seams of his flannel; his jeans are dusty, liberally splattered with mud, and his teeth are very, very white. He has a thick mane of reddish-blond hair, the bristly beginnings of a full beard, and surprisingly elegant bone structure.

"You never said anything about subtle," Godric calls out, boots crunching as he walks towards them. "In _fact_ , you were cryptic as shit—you're lucky I found you at all."

"Not sure _lucky_ is the word I'd use, but—"

"Oh, fuck off," Godric says fondly, grin spreading even wider—until he notices Pansy, and his expression visibly falters. "Uh. Hey. Wow. I—don't know you."

She presses her lips together. "Pretty sure you're not supposed to."

"This is Pansy," Salazar interjects with a long-suffering sigh. "She's twenty-one. Her birthday was in January. We're taking her east."

Godric furrows his brow. "Okay," he says. Up close, Pansy can see that his eyes are a soft, weirdly piercing shade of green. "That's—okay. East. What's east?"

Pansy shrugs. The laces of her Chucks are double-knotted, yanked tight, the split-end tips brushing against the insides of her ankles, fraying and fragile like spider webs. She folds her arms over her lower abdomen and lets the silence stretch on.

"Okay," Godric says again, much more slowly. And then, much more quietly, "Okay."

"Okay," Salazar says, sounding grimly amused. He turns towards the white cargo van, wrist relaxed and pistol pointed towards the sky. "Well, now that we're all friends, I'm going _over there_ to see if the battery in that—"

He cuts himself off.

Everything goes really, really wrong really, really fast.

 

* * *

 

Pansy doesn't see it happen.

Godric sweeps a massive fucking arm out, shoves her backwards and yells for her to _get down, get down, get_ —

She gets down.

She ducks her head.

She hears the slithering screech of one of those— _things_ , hears the click of a pistol hammer and a frantic punched-out grunt and Godric's still yelling, the smoky blast of his shotgun ringing right alongside the aching rush of blood in her ears—and then there's a sickening crunch, bone and gristle and snapping, gnashing teeth, and a gurgle, syrupy and awful, and a mangled huff of laughter, short and sharp and bitter, disbelieving, and then—and then—

"—always with the fucking _drama_ , man," Godric is saying, deep voice trembling with a hazy note of panic. "Fucking—always."

"Yeah, well," Salazar chokes out, "you're the one who threw a—a, _fuck_ —a six year tantrum after—after—fuck, _fuck_ , Godric. _Godric_. You have to—you _have_ to, alright?"

Pansy squeezes her eyes shut.

 

* * *

 

There's one last shot.

A loud, booming echo.

 

* * *

 

"C'mon," Godric says, after, dropping a heavy, callused hand onto the knob of Pansy's shoulder. "We need to get going."

Pansy glances up, but doesn't move. "We?"

"Yeah," he replies flatly. "We."

She studies him for a moment—the laugh lines around his eyes, and the naturally generous curve of his mouth, and there's something so innately compelling about his face, his features, the angles and the shadows and the faint dusting of burnished-brown freckles on the bridge of his nose—and she thinks, maybe, _impulsively_ , that she can salvage this. Use this.

"Okay," she says, getting to her feet. The straps of her tank top are twisted, the faded satin of her bra peeking out from sweat-streaked purple cotton. "We."

He gives her a cursory once-over. "You haven't been bit, right?"

She keeps her gaze level with his—avoids looking anywhere but straight ahead. "No."

"There's just—" He stops, toying with an empty shotgun shell, watching it skate across the scabs on his knuckles. "There's a lot of blood. On you."

"It's not mine," Pansy says, and hopes he doesn't notice the way her voice shivers, just that little bit, on the last word. "It's not—anyone. It's just blood."

Godric nods, almost absently, and clears his throat. "Right, yeah," he murmurs. "Salazar—he wouldn't have—you're probably fine. Right."

She thinks about what Salazar had seen her do—thinks about the sensory leftovers, the dull pang of unease and the violent quake of fear and the prickling itch of her skin, her scalp, her fingertips—and she wishes, abruptly, that Godric had finished that fucking sentence.

"Where are you—where are we going, then?" she asks, crossing her arms over her chest as she follows him to his truck.

He pockets the empty shotgun shell and opens the passenger side door for her, a smile—small and distant and helpless and angry and obviously not directed at her, obviously not _meant_ for her—ghosting around the corners of his mouth.

"East, apparently," Godric says. "We're going east."

 

* * *

 

They're passing a sign for the Coachella Valley, cautiously weaving around a logjam of abandoned cars, and the silence—inside, outside, everywhere—is as sullen as it is oppressive.

"Sorry," Pansy eventually blurts out. The chain of her necklace has a tiny knot around the clasp, but taking the time to unravel it seems—unnecessary. "For...for Salazar."

Godric shifts in his seat. "Not your fault."

"I didn't say it was."

"Then what are you apologizing for?"

"I'm not _apologizing_."

Godric cranes his neck to navigate around a jackknifed station wagon and a pile of overturned construction cones. "Does sorry mean something besides _sorry_ where you're from?"

Pansy digs the wobbly crescent of her thumbnail into the pad of her index finger. "A shitty thing happened. I was acknowledging that."

"Oh, yeah?"

She grits her teeth hard enough for pain to spark through the hinge of her jaw. " _Yeah_."

"Huh." He rolls his shoulders and hums. "You know how to shoot a gun, princess?"

"Don't call me that."

He snorts. "Answer the question, princess."

She scowls out the window. It's pitch-black, a starless sky and a moonless horizon and a vacant sort of stillness seeping into the air, pushing against the confines of the truck. There's nothing to see. Nothing to run from.

"Do I _look_ like I know how to shoot a gun?" she asks, scratching at a speck of dirt on the back of her wrist.

"No," Godric says, lifting his foot off the gas and peering at the murky silhouette of what she guesses might be a truck stop. "But you sure as shit _sound_ like someone who does."

Pansy scoffs. "Right, because down south they teach us how to talk _real slow_ , just like this, and then give us all shotguns."

He curls his tongue around his front teeth, as if to stave off a grin, and then jerks the steering wheel to the left, headlights swooping down and tires spinning out and perforated charcoal leather gliding smoothly beneath his palms.

"That a no?" he asks, gaze sharpening, slightly, as he brings the truck to a gradual halt. " _Princess?_ "

Her nostrils flare. "I said—don't _call_ me that."

Godric eyes her curiously. "That's not a no."

She lifts her chin and looks around the truck stop. There are a couple of empty Mayflower rigs scattered around the parking lot, an ominously sprawling ocean of asphalt, and a ransacked bank of vending machines lurking next to a small cinder-block building with a hole where the door should've been.

"I used to hunt with my dad," she admits, finally, turning to face Godric. "I'm probably a better shot than you."

 

* * *

 

There are showers at the truck stop.

"C'mon," Godric says, hovering in what's left of the bathroom doorway. His posture is rigid, gaze firmly fixed outside while she strips out of her dirty clothes. "Hurry up."

The water's freezing, and it's muddy with rust when it starts to dribble out of the faucet. "This is fucking stupid," Pansy hisses, scrubbing viciously at the blood on her face, and her arms, and her neck. "We're going to get—"

"We're not going to _get_ anything," Godric interrupts. "You looked like you'd been bit. If we happen to run into—"

She ducks under the spray to wet her hair, eyelashes clumping together, and misses the rest of whatever he says. " _Except_ ," she argues, "I _wasn't_ bit."

"You think that matters?"

"Yeah? Why wouldn't it?"

"Because," Godric says impatiently, "there's no National Guard out here. People don't wait for you to explain yourself."

Pansy bends down to rinse the dust and grit out of the road rash on her knees, necklace swaying with the movement. "You did."

"What?"

" _You_ waited for me to explain myself."

The shower sputters, pipes groaning, and Godric's fingers twitch towards the knife sheathed at his hip. "That was—different."

"Why? Because I was with _Salazar?_ " Pansy needles, a little cruelly, reaching for the towel Godric had shoved at her earlier. It's white and scratchy and smells like laundry detergent.

"Well, yeah," Godric replies, too easily. And then, like it's an afterthought: "Isn't that why you trust me? Because of Salazar?"

Pansy pats her cheeks dry. "I _don't_ trust you."

"Oh?" Godric drawls, sounding unfairly amused. "So, you came with me because..."

Pansy wraps herself in the towel and concentrates on keeping her expression as blank as she possibly can. "I'm done."

Godric doesn't immediately respond, but there's tension in his spine, in his silence—and she wonders at it. At him.

"Here," he says, tossing her a flannel shirt; one of his, obviously, checkered red and gold, clean and huge and pleasantly warm. She tugs it over her head, buttoning it up to her collarbones, and then looks askance at her discarded underwear.

"—miles to Blythe, should be able to find you some stuff there," Godric is saying. He's leaning sideways into the crumbling cinder-block wall, ankles crossed and hands shoved into his pockets. He's dragging the toe of his boot back and forth along the ground. "You about dressed, princess?"

Pansy kicks her underwear out of the way. "Don't call me that," she says tiredly, nudging his foot with hers as she steps around him. Her hair is dripping between her shoulder blades, and her skin feels soft and raw where it's rubbing against the fabric of his shirt. "Can we go now?"

Godric stares at her, looking kind of startled—looking kind of startled _that_ he's startled, maybe—and then he licks his lips. "Uh, yeah," he mumbles, shaking his head. "Yeah, we can go."

She shivers.

That water was really fucking cold.

 

* * *

 

They end up at a strip mall on the outskirts of a medium-sized city that seems to have more churches than it does gas stations.

The stucco is a grungy peach-pink, and the windows are boarded up with splintering, graffiti-slick plywood. Smashed terra cotta roof tiles litter the sidewalk. An unsettling shuffling sound—interspersed with inconsistent thumps and shrill, seesawing moans—is echoing from inside one of the stores.

Godric grimaces.

 

* * *

 

Pansy quickly fills a backpack with durable, dark-wash jeans and form-fitting henleys, utilitarian tank tops and cheap, neon-colored sports bras and multi-packs of plain white cotton panties—and she fiddles with the cuff of a suede leather jacket hanging from the New Arrivals rack, tucks the tiny seed pearl cross on her necklace into the front of her shirt, wastes a minute remembering crocheted lace skirts and corn silk blonde bobby pins and the gelatinous sheen of freshly polished nails—

"Hey," Godric whispers, using the sleeve of a mustard yellow cardigan to wipe down the blade of his knife. "You ready?"

Pansy squints at the blood on his hands—blood that's unnaturally syrupy, blacker than it is red, and looks vaguely like tar from a distance—and is grateful, suddenly, that he'd forced her to take a shower.

"Yeah," she lies. "I'm ready."

 

* * *

 

A few hours later, she wakes up with a gasp.

For a split-second, she's disoriented; there's a shuttered, oval-shaped air conditioning vent directly in front of her, partially camouflaged by the pebbled leather of a dashboard, and a sheet of heavy, lukewarm window glass under her cheek. Music is quietly trickling out from the speakers, something upbeat and instrumental that she doesn't recognize. There's a twilight-stained shadow of what could be a mountain, or a canyon, or a plateau, or whatever the fuck they call enormous, craggy piles of sand and rock in the desert—it's skirting around the edges of her vision, a fixed point on an otherwise limitless expanse of terrain.

"You alright?" Godric asks, carefully neutral.

Pansy blinks at him. Once. Twice. "I fell asleep?"

"Yeah," he says, and then yawns into his fist, jaw creaking as he stretches his mouth wide. A dented can of Red Bull is sitting in her cup holder; an empty shotgun shell is in his. "You looked like you needed it."

She reaches blindly for the water bottle nestled between her feet. "Where are we?"

"Arizona."

" _Where_ in Arizona?"

"Well, you missed Phoenix, but we're not too far from Tombstone, if you wanted to stop."

Pansy frowns. "Are you joking?"

Godric shrugs, but his lips are twitching. "I like Westerns."

 

* * *

 

They don't stop in Tombstone, but they do eventually stop.

The sun is just starting to rise when Godric pulls into the parking lot of a run-down motel that feels like it's about a thousand miles removed from the rest of the world. The clunky metal sign is bleached white with age and sun, washing out the name; Pansy thinks she can make out the flaking remnants of a hand-painted palm tree and the word "OASIS", as well as a few marquee letters spelling out "VACANCY" and "FREE HBO".

"Nap time," Godric says, cracking his knuckles and looking appraisingly at the upstairs rooms. The doors are painted a faded, milky aqua. "Food first, though."

Pansy watches him jump down from the truck, watches how he automatically checks for his knife, pats down the extra bullets in his pockets—he's intimidatingly competent, bigger than her and stronger than her and, no matter what she might've told him earlier, better than her at this. At fighting, at killing, at pulling the trigger.

She wasn't lying when she said she didn't trust him.

"Stay close," he mutters when she joins him at the base of the rickety wooden stairs leading up to the second level. "Stay _quiet_."

She fists one hand in the back of his shirt and the other around the cross on her necklace, keeping her footsteps light. He smells like stale sweat and Doublemint and one of those woodsy, hyper-masculine deodorants that reminds her of sneaking into the boys' locker room to decorate on game days, dusting glitter onto the apples of her cheeks and tying her hair back with a Rebels red ribbon.

She smirks, suddenly.

Godric hasn't given her a weapon.

He doesn't trust her, either.

 

* * *

 

Breakfast is peanut butter crackers and vanilla-flavored Ensure.

Pansy takes the travel-sized bag of toiletries Godric offers her—toothbrush, toothpaste, mouthwash—and goes into the bathroom. The sink is relatively clean, but the mirror is spotty with dust and grime and the carcasses of several dead insects. The freckles on her nose are blurry.

"What did you do, before?" she asks, breaking the weirdly fragile silence as she finger-combs the tangled ends of her hair. "Like, what was your job?"

"What?" Godric calls out, and then there's a loud thud, probably from the dresser being pushed up against the door. "Oh, I was a teacher."

"A teacher?"

"Yeah." He doesn't elaborate. "What about you? What were you doing?"

Pansy squints at her reflection. "That explains a lot, actually," she muses, ignoring his question. "You being a teacher."

He appears behind her, sleeves rolled up to his elbows and the top three buttons of his flannel undone. "Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah," she says, meeting his eyes in the mirror. He's studying her intently, and she wonders what it is he thinks he's looking for. "Like why you took me with you."

He snorts and fiddles with something in his pocket. "What else was I gonna do, princess? Leave you to make friends with the dinosaurs?"

She licks her lips and pretends not to notice the way his gaze drops, and then lingers, and then skitters away. She pauses, though, considers the breadth of his shoulders and the gunmetal calluses on his palms, considers how he's touched her, cautiously, _carefully_ , like she might break, like _he_ might break _her_ —and she turns around.

"Don't call me that," she murmurs, angling her body so she can step around him; but the doorway is too small, too cramped, and she's brushing up against his chest, warm skin and hard muscle, before she can stumble back.

He's standing closer than she thought he was.

 

* * *

 

The next two days are slow.

The highway narrows and widens and narrows again as they drive through southwest New Mexico, and it's bleak, the colors dull and muted, the sparse, barely-there towns they pass through almost anachronistic in their solitude. Godric pulls over frequently, at boarded-up gas stations and long-abandoned convenience stores, pilfering diesel and water and batteries and stacks of crossword puzzles, sudoku books, a package of sparkly pastel gel pens and a bottle of bright turquoise nail polish and a baby pink camo-print hat that he very obviously thinks is _hilarious_ —

Pansy has too much time to think.

Godric has an unsettling habit of treating everything he does like it's a fucking adventure, like it's exciting to stake out an old grocery store, to communicate entirely in hand signals and hold their breath when they round the corner of the cereal aisle. It isn't exciting. He teaches her how to throw a punch that relies more on velocity than it does on strength, and she teaches him how to properly hold his hunting knife, how to protect the inside of his wrist, how to carve down instead of stab up.

There's a strange precariousness to their situation; to her situation. It's impermanent, it has to be, but the farther they get from California, the farther they get from what happened there and what it fucking meant—the less clear their final destination seems to become.

_East_ , she'd said, _I need to go east._

A lot of things are east. Texas is east. The Atlantic Ocean is east. Home is east, technically, but the problem— _her_ problem—is that she isn't sure anymore that she'd ever actually intended to _go_ home.

Especially now.

Especially with Godric.

 

* * *

 

They get ambushed in El Paso.

That's probably the wrong word for it. Ambush implies forethought, and strategy, and tactical proficiency, and those— _things_ , they aren't capable of that. They're mindless. Dead, or something eerily similar, and there's a peculiar horror to how they shuffle their feet and flap their jaws and charge forward, _fall_ forward, like the concept of self-preservation is as impossible as it is alien.

"Get down, get down, get down!" Godric shouts at her, sweeping his arm out.

She gets down.

And it's like déjà vu, the thundering of her pulse in her ears and the ice-cold trickle of terror skittering up and down her spine—she leaves her eyes open, stares and stares and stares at a gaping fissure in the sidewalk cement, tendrils of brittle yellow grass sprouting from the top, and she listens, she listens to the whispering whistle of steel slicing through the air, the slightly too heavy splash of blood on the ground, the slow, sinuous tapering of the muted whimpers and the wavering moans—

After, Godric's less of a mess than she thought he'd be.

There's sweat streaking his face, darkening the red-gold hair at the nape of his neck, and he's grinning, smug with exhilaration, a conquering hero in a shirt splattered plaid with pulpy flecks of cherry-tinted gore.

"Shit," he hisses abruptly, prodding at a sluggishly bleeding wound on his hand.

Pansy's arms—already wrapped around her own torso in a fucking parody of a real hug—tighten dangerously. "Were you—is that—were you bit? Scratched?"

"What?" Godric asks, infuriatingly calm, before blinking. "Oh, no—no, no, no, I just—I nicked myself. With the knife. Still not used to it, I guess."

"You nicked yourself," she repeats. "With the knife."

He tugs his shirt over his head, baring a smooth expanse of pale, lightly freckled skin. His chest and shoulders are thick with muscle, not quite sculpted, no, but _solid_. He has a tattoo on his ribs, a huge block of text that's harsh and angry and doesn’t appear to be written in English.

"Yeah," he says, rummaging through a duffel bag in the bed of the truck. The line of his back is long, and sturdy, and oddly graceful. "Just need to clean it out, bandage it up, should be fine—"

"Are you fucking _serious?_ " Pansy interjects, an abstract sort of fury coating the back of her tongue. It's acrid. Sticky. Unexpected.

"What?"

"You nicked yourself," she says again, more loudly. "Are you—can you—could you _be_ any dumber?"

He stiffens. "Excuse me?"

"You just, you treat those— _things_ like they're a fucking _joke_ ," Pansy snaps. "Like this is _fun_. And now you're _bleeding_ , and you're so—you're reckless, and you're careless, and, yeah, you're _dumb_."

Godric turns around again, a fresh shirt bunched between his fingers, and his grin is tighter. Harder. Less forgiving. "If I didn't know better, princess, I'd think you were worried about me."

Her nostrils flare. "Don't call me that."

"Why not?" he demands, a little meanly.

She curls her toes inside of her Chucks. The clasp of her necklace is sitting at an awkward angle, tickling her clavicle. "I don't—" She breaks off, directing her gaze to the shattered neon Taco Bell sign standing behind him. It's an old one. Faded purple and magenta and seafoam green. "I don't understand why you took me with you."

"What, like I was gonna leave you? By yourself?"

"You could have," she insists. "I would have been—"

"You would _not_ have been fine," Godric interrupts, too flatly. "Jesus fucking _Christ_."

She swallows. "So?"

He rears back. " _So,_ I—what the _fuck,_ " he says, and he sounds appalled, actually, like the very idea of allowing her to be swarmed by a ravenous pack of flesh-eating monsters is fucking _offensive_ to him. Maybe it is. "I wasn't just going to let you  _die._ "

"Wow," Pansy deadpans, gesturing expansively around the barren, corpse-strewn wasteland they've found themselves in. "Well, don't do me any _favors_."

He furrows his brow like he isn't sure how to respond—like he isn't sure if he _needs_ to respond—but then his face clears and his lips part, curve upwards, stretch into a helpless half-smile, and Pansy—

Pansy doesn't know why she's so surprised when he starts laughing.

 

* * *

 

The sunrise blushes pink and blue and orange in the desert.

"Were you married?" Pansy asks, pulling her knees up to her chest and staring out at the foothills. "Before? Or—engaged. Dating someone. Anyone."

Godric shrugs. "Nah. It was always...there was always something more important going on, you know?"

Pansy doesn't know. "Yeah. Sure."

"What, uh, what about you?"

She sniffs. "What about me?"

He raises his eyebrows.

She leans forward to pluck at an errant acacia twig. Her necklace swings with the motion, grazing her legs. "No," she says. "There was—I mean, there was someone. A long time ago. But I don't...I don't think that was what I thought it was."

Godric takes a long gulp of water and squints up at the sky. He isn't difficult to read—hasn't really ever been, not even that first horrible night in California—but there's something strangely guarded about his expression now. The carbon fiber hilt of his hunting knife glints silver and onyx in the slowly sharpening rays of sunlight.

"You're young," he eventually says, and then huffs out a laugh. "You're really fucking young."

She clenches her jaw. "What does that mean?"

"Nothing, I guess." He pauses before adding, almost begrudgingly, "It means that you've got time to figure it out."

She bristles with irritation. "Yeah? And is that what you thought _before_ , when you had _more important stuff_ going on? That you had time?"

Godric's answering grin flashes bright, bright white. "What makes you think I still don't?"

 

* * *

 

"I got my period," she announces three days later, somewhere between San Antonio and Houston. "Just, like. So you know."

Godric freezes with one hand on the steering wheel and one reaching for the ugly silver Ray-Bans he keeps tucked behind his rearview mirror. "Uh. Okay?"

Pansy rolls her eyes and turns to stare out the window. Bland brown grass. Weirdly flat looking hills. There are some trees, startlingly green against the blue of the sky, and more abandoned pick-up trucks with "EVERYTHING'S BIGGER IN TEXAS" bumper stickers than she cares to count.

"The—things," Pansy says, a little impatiently, drumming her fingers against her thigh. "They're attracted to blood, aren't they?"

Godric shifts in his seat. "You never call them what they are," he remarks, uncharacteristically hesitant.

Pansy presses her lips together. "We don't know what they are."

He scoffs. "Really?"

There's a dull, pinching pain in her lower abdomen, the piercing strains of a headache beginning to drill at the soft spots on her skull, and Pansy wonders, spitefully, why her body won't just let itself succumb to malnutrition like her ninth-grade health teacher said it would.

"Really," she retorts, forcing a smile.

 

* * *

 

The sign that welcomes them to Louisiana is big and blue and plastered with a matte gold fleur-de-lis that's edged in black and flaking right off the center.

It's hotter, somehow, even when it's dark out, the air heavier, wetter, harder to unstick from the cavern of her lungs; and it's visceral, the way her breath catches, expands, transports her back— _back_ , to a summer that smelled like hibiscus honey and Coppertone, freckles sunburned on her nose and American flags painted on her toenails and that lazy, languorous heat seeping through her pores. Slowing down the clock. Casting everything in a deceptively unreal haze that made fairytales out of nightmares.

"I was married," Pansy blurts out somewhere east of Lafayette. "Before. I had a—I was married."

Out of the corner of her eye, she watches Godric adjust his grip on the steering wheel, silently mouthing 'married' to himself. In Lake Charles, he'd traded his never-ending parade of lumberjack flannels for a multi-pack of tight white v-necks. It's still pretty distracting.

"Wow," he replies, biceps bunching as he reaches up to scratch at his jaw. "Married. That's. I didn't—really didn't see that coming, to be honest."

"Yeah," Pansy says, crossing and uncrossing her legs. There's an itch under her skin—a nervous, desperate sort of energy that she's choosing not to acknowledge. "It was—I mean, I was eighteen, and he was—we'd been together for a really long time. Years."

Godric is careful about glancing over at her. Wary. "He was with you in L.A., then?"

She yanks her hair out of its ponytail and snaps the flamingo pink elastic around her wrist. "No."

"Ah."

"I was alone," she explains, probably unnecessarily, but it's like—a flood, almost, a rapidly crashing wave of words that she can't control and can't take back and can't seem to regret, either. "We were fighting, before I left, and I think—I wanted him to chase me, you know? I wanted him to care that I was gone."

Godric presses down on the gas pedal, speeding through an open stretch of highway. "Is that—is he what's east? Your, uh, husband?"

Pansy shakes her head. "I was in California for a year."

"Oh."

"Salazar wasn't going to take me east, anyway," she continues, twisting the fabric of her tank top between her fingers. "We both know that."

Godric lifts his foot off the brake to coast towards an exit. "How did you—" He pauses. "Where did you—" Another pause. "Salazar wasn't a...friendly guy."

Pansy thinks about the empty shotgun shell Godric had deposited in his cup holder the night they'd met—the one he'd willfully ignored ever since—and rests her cheek against the car window.

"I never said goodbye," she murmurs.

"What? To who? To—Salazar?"

She licks her lips. "To anyone."

There's a whole mess of stars spackling the skyline, twinkling silver on velvety black, and it looks nothing like home ever did.

 

* * *

 

Godric goes into a liquor store in Mobile and comes out with a case of tangerine flavored water, a travel pack of Midol, and a dusty bottle of Malibu.

He doesn't say anything when he stops the truck on one of the bridges near the city center, the white-yellow beam of the headlights soaring out over the Gulf. He just kills the engine, twists the cap off the rum, and takes a long, noisy swig of it.

"I'm a lot older than you," he says quietly.

She huffs. "And I'm a lot smarter than you, what's your point?"

"The stakes are higher now," he says, sounding pensive. "You have to be sure about what you want."

She looks up at him, at the ring of rich amber brown encircling the soft, clear green of his eyes, and tucks the tiny seed pearl cross on her necklace into her bra. "Are we talking about me or you?"

He chuckles, and then sighs, breath hissing through his teeth. "Fuck," he whispers, stretching his arm out along the back of her seat. His hand drifts up, gently cupping the nape of her neck. "Fuck it."

The kiss that comes next is hard and fast and hot, deliberately overwhelming, she thinks, more of a challenge than an explicit expression of anything else—and she arches into it.

She's been hedging her bets since the world had ended, reminding herself that miles are divisible by feet, by inches, that forward is forward and baby steps still count and she's so—she's climbing over the gearshift, into Godric's lap, squeezing her knees around his hips and grinding down, fumbling for the zipper on his jeans, and he's annoyingly efficient about unclasping her bra and shoving her tank top out of the way and trailing his mouth along the hinge of her jaw, thumbing her nipples and biting at her throat, and—she wants.

She wants.

She wants.

She wants to _take_ , and she wants to not feel guilty about it, and she wants to be eighteen and fucking _dumb_ again, wants to lick her lips and taste sweet tea and Maybelline and Draco Malfoy's arrogantly playful " _of course I love you, princess_ " and she wants to erase that, erase him, wants to be wrong and mean and indifferent and evasive and she wants to wake up sticky with sweat and honeysuckle but not another rendition of " _of course I love you, princess_ " because there's no such fucking thing, of course, of course, of—

"Pansy," Godric is saying now, voice too loud in her ears. He's leaning back, away from her, one hand curled around her waist and the other flat between her shoulder blades, and he's breathing a little heavily. "Pansy, are you—shit, are you okay?"

She's crying.

She swipes at the tear tracks on her face.

She's fucking _crying_.

"Yeah, I'm—" She hiccups around a laugh, and then a sob, and then another laugh, and then she says, more honestly than she could have ever anticipated, "I'm okay, yeah."

 

* * *

 

The rest of Alabama is a blur.

Godric touches her a lot more often—brief, tantalizing brushes of his hand against her knee, her thigh, her waist, his palm warm on her lower back as he guides her out of a motel room, down the rickety stairs, curves his fingers around her hips to push her towards the truck—and it's all so thoughtless, so _casual_ , that she can't help but marvel at how diligently he must've been holding himself back. He's tactile. Affectionate. Comfortable with the _idea_ of a partnership, even if the mechanics aren't quite clear to him yet.

They aren't having sex.

Which isn't really relevant, because she doesn't know where they're going, doesn’t know where they're planning to stop or if they're planning to stop or what's going to happen if they do both, if they do neither, and when they sidle past the Florida state line and he glances over, flashing her one of those surprisingly sly, surprisingly sincere almost-grins—she feels a stab of something fierce and foreign in her gut, suddenly, and she wants to tell him everything, wants to confess and wants to confide and wants to _explain_ that Salazar had only taken her with him because he'd owed her, because she'd screamed at the right time and she'd brought her knife down at the right time and she hadn't thought twice about it, hadn't been able to, and now, _now_ , she wants Godric to know all of that, wants him to know that she isn't helpless and she isn't innocent and she doesn't blame him for being selfish, for needing her to be his excuse to fight and kill and _run_ —

They pull over for the night in Tallahassee.

 

* * *

 

The next morning, she wakes up to an arm around her waist and a hot, open-mouthed kiss between her shoulder blades.

Breakfast is stale Cheerios and chocolate-cranberry granola bars and Fruit Punch flavored Gatorade. Before pushing the dresser away from the door, Godric tosses one last considering look at the bed, at the tangled sheets and the rumpled pillows, and then cracks a deeply self-satisfied grin.

It all goes downhill from there.

Godric is dumping a duffel bag into the bed of the truck when he glances up and over her shoulder, when he goes scarily, strikingly still, when he scrambles for his shotgun and shouts at her to _get down, get down, get down_ —

The zombie comes at her from behind.

She darts to the side, spins around, trips over her shoelaces, and it's reaching for her, the white of its bones peeking out through sagging scraps of green-tinged skin—and it claws at her necklace, snapping the chain, and she manages to jump back just fast enough to avoid getting scratched, but—

She doesn't get down.

Instead, she lunges forward, shoving the zombie to the ground, and Godric is yelling, frantic and furious, and he's running over, she thinks, almost clinically, and it's—time is weird, then, time _goes_ weird, then, because she's completely detached from whatever's happening in reality, her brain occupying those backwards, grayscale gaps between every passing second, and she's seeing a Doublemint wrapper to her left and a big, heavy rock to her right and the sun-sharp glint of her necklace looped around rotting flesh and exposed knuckles and she's fucking _angry_ , she realizes with a quivering jolt of surprise, she's so, so angry, and she's grabbing the rock, she's ignoring Godric's panicked shouting, she's heaving it up and she's stumbling forward again and she's slamming it down, once and then twice and again and again and—

Silence descends on the parking lot.

There's a nauseating pile of pink and gray pulp on the asphalt when she thinks to look down, and it occurs to her—blankly, blindly, belatedly—that Godric never had gotten around to giving her a real weapon.

She doesn't bother wondering what that says about her, that it hadn't mattered.

She thinks she already knows.

"Here," Godric offers, after, holding out her necklace.

Pansy stares at it—for too long, probably. The delicate gold chain. The tiny seed pearl cross. The broken links, and the slight discoloration near the clasp, and the impenetrable knot of dirty blonde hair wound around the fish-eye hook.

"No, it's—it's fine," she croaks. She guesses this would all be a lot fucking easier if she knew what the fuck she was saying goodbye to. "Leave it."

Godric studies her for a while, his expression flickering with something different—something _new_. He's never looked at her like this before; like she's a puzzle he's had the pieces to all along. Like there were parts of her he could've recognized, right from the beginning, if he'd just thought to check.

She'd remember, if he had.

"You sure?" he asks, voice neutral.

She nods, and then she shakes her head, and then she—

"Yeah," she says, and it's the strangest, saddest sensation—meaning it, knowing it, digging deep enough into the past and the present and the future, even, to find the answer. "I'm sure."

 

* * *

 

The I-10 ends in Jacksonville, Florida.

There's a maze of on- and off-ramps crowded with rusting sedans and sun-dappled minivans, a blue-and-red sign for another highway riddled with bullet holes and copper-brown streaks of dried blood—the I-95 goes north, up the coast, through the Carolinas and the Mid-Atlantic and the autumn shaded New England states, all the way to the Canadian border. To a time-frozen landscape rife with maple trees and snowy mountains and the world's politest fucking zombies. Maybe.

Pansy doesn't know.

She's never been to Canada.

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> [come join me in hell](http://www.provocative-envy.tumblr.com)


End file.
